John Updike Quotes
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When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
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If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
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about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.
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Thelma '...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it.'
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
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Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
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I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
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'The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.'
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coming away from the doctor's after a check-up Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.
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Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
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Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
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A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
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His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
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No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
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'...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.'
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...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.
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'Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.'
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He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
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This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
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Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
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re the human heart That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
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Nelson '...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife.'
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Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?